1. Akshay Sthapit IT Opportunities in Nepal

3. Co-founder of Harilo.com

4. PhD in Earthquake Engineering (Berkeley, MIT, Georgia Tech)

5. Dissertation in Robotics, minor in Math (numerical Analysis)

6. Co-founder of finance startup in Boston

7. Moved back to Nepal 3 years agoMy Background

9. Simple problem, simple idea, simple solution

10. Zero funding – I hate loans

11. 2 member team

12. Built the site from scratch on my own on a cheap netbook

13. Taught myself Ruby on Rails and hosted it on Amazon EC2

14. Simple web application that lets you submit URLs

15. Today we have 10 full time employees, warehouse in Florida, storage in Kathmandu, 1 delivery van, 1 delivery/pickup motorcycle

16. 6000 regular customers, 20,000 page views per day, weekly shipmentsHarilo.com

17. The idea

19. Long time to break even

20. Large overhead

21. Opaque

22. Incremental improvement

23. Suits (old = wise)

24. Zero initial investment

25. Immediately “Ramen profitable”

26. Low cost to run business

27. Transparent

28. Disruptive

29. Jeans (young = agile)Old Model New Model LILO – Little in lot out

31. Good technology is NOT good business

32. But it is great for increasing efficiency

33. Think in terms of offering products and services NOT technology

34. Question all assumptions and go back to basics

35. IT + Inefficiency = Disruptive!

36. Lot of inefficiencies in Nepal

37. Therefore lots of IT opportunities!Inefficiency + Technology = Business Model The role of technology

39. Cost of starting a IT based business is virtually zero

40. Host your web site or web service for free on sites like Heroku

41. Scale up as much as you want – only pay for what you use

42. Unlimited bandwidth, unlimited storage, unlimited CPU

43. No longer need to maintain servers

44. EC2, S3, Google App Engine, Rackspace etc. etc.

45. Cloud servers, cloud apps, cloud management

46. Secure, scalable, cheaper, bandh proof!Leverage the cloud

48. Uniformity = blind leading the blind

49. Uniformity = boring

50. It is incredibly hard for foreigners to work and start a business in Nepal

51. Most young people in the world do NOT have the capital that Nepal requires for FDI

52. We need to welcome talented young foreigners into Nepal

53. I’ve personally seen 5 extremely talented young people (three that were Harvard, MIT, and Oxford graduates) who were forced to leave Nepal because of VISA issuesNeed to let in more foreigners

55. We quickly took down the chat room and replaced it with a commenting system

56. Now customers love us – ‘OMG. YOU GUYS ARE AWESOME. YOU ANSWER COMMENTS WITHIN 2 HOURS!’

57. We have a team of 6 in KTM that answers comments and does customer quotes for thousands of customers.

58. Leverage IT and be asynchronous. It will increase efficiency, lower costs, and make everyone happy.Be asynchronous

60. Iterate rapidly

61. Let customers give you feedback

62. Wash, rinse, repeat

63. Success in tech startups has little to do with how much money you raise

64. Forget money, and forget technology

65. Focus on creating a service or product that people want to useBe Lean

67. Apply the right technology

68. Be transparent and honest with your customers

69. Make people love you

70. IT has the potential to create jobs, create businesses, and make life in Nepal easierInefficiencies = opportunities